"make-do spirit of post-war" late '07/early '08

While the spirit of post-war austerity constrained the imagination, the need to make do liberated it, and is something that should be more widely inculcated in problem solvers (i.e. everyone). Of course one should use the resources at one's disposal and not conserve them pointlessly, but equally when an expected resource fails or available resources are insufficient to solve a problem adequately, one should move quickly to find an alternative solution. Scarcity, as much as necessity, is the mother of invention, and hence trying always to do things faster and with fewer resources will often lead to better ideas: working with the mind-set of someone more resource-constrained than one really is will tend to make one more creative and come up with better plans.

(One can translate this into the cardinal virtues of impatience, insofar as the resource is time, and, a little more imaginatively, laziness, insofar as it concerns material resources; this makes more sense if one thinks of one's resources as part of oneself.)

12th June 2008